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1944
1943 1944 1945 Events * Republican Wendell Wilkie withdraws from the race for the presidency after coming in fourth in the Wisconsin Republican Party Primary. His advisors warned him not to enter that primary but he ignored them. * Liberal Party of Australia is established. * Fritz Land releases Ministry of Fear * Oswald T. Avery, Maclyn McCarty and Colin MacLeod identify DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) as the agenct for genetic transformation in bacteria. * Argentine Lazlo Biro invents the ballpoint pen. * Scottish Medium Helen Duncan is tried an convicted of witchcaft and espionag, and sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison. She wil be the last woman convicted of witchcraft in Britain. * General Electric chemists accidently invent "Silly Putty," marketed in 1949. * German economist Rudolf Hilferding is killed by the Nazis. So too is German Social Democrat and former Minister of the Interior Rudolf Breitscheid. * William Casey is assigned to the OSS in London. Malcolm Muggeridge writes: "Ah, those first OSS arrivals in London. How well I remember them, arriving like jeunes filles en fleur straight from a finishing school, all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frowsy old intelligence brothel." * The French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST; English: Directorate of Territorial Surveillance) established. Timeline January * January 22: U.S. Pres. FDR establishes the War Refugee Board. * January 24: Angela Davis is born. * January 30-February 8: Brazzaville Conference February * February 2: Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels sends letter to Joseph Stalin proposing the creation of a Soviet Jewish Republic in Crimea, a "Jewish California" on the Black Sea. * February 3: ARAMCO announces it will build an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. March * March 19: Maronite Christian Sirhan Sirhan is born in Jerusalem. * March 24: Pres. Roosevelt warns Fascist gov't of Hungary to refrain from anti-Jewish measures. * March 28: Hungarian government bans the Social Democratic Party and Independent Smallholders party. April * April 15-16: Fascist gov't of Hungary begins registering Jews, confiscating their property and deporting them. May * May 11: Deportation of 200,000 Crimean Tatars from Crimea, as ordered by Joseph Stalin. * May 16: The first of 180,000 Hungarian Jews arrive at Auschwitz. * May 31: Japanese Imperial Army invasion of british colonial India from British colonial Burma ends only 70 kilometers into Nagaland. June * June 6: D-Day: American, British, Canadian and French forces land on the beaches of Normandy. * June 11: John F. Kennedy is awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and Purple Heart for his actions while in command of PT-109. July * July: Polish Committee of National Liberation is organized. Polish Worker's Party adopts a nationalist programme. * July 7: Hungarian dictator Miklos Horthy halts deportations of Jews, but 440,000 have already been sent to Nazi concentration camps. * July 24: American forces land at Tinian, future bomber base for strategic bombing of civilian population centers on Japanese home islands; napalm is used for the first time in the assault on the island. August * August 5: Cowra Camp POW revolt in New South Wales, Australia. * August 12: Joe Kennedy Jr., is killed when his Army Air Corps plane explodes shortly after take-off. This is the fate of the B-17s and B-24s used in the Aphrodite Program. * August 16: "Little Khural" rump parliament of the Tuvan people's Republic, offers Tuva's sovereignty to the Soviet Union. Two months later the country becomes the Tuvan Autonomous Region of the USSR. * August 17: Jörg Friedrich is born in Kitzbühel. * August 23: Red Army enters Bucharest. * August 25: Paris is liberated. De gaulle gives a speech from Hotel de Ville in which he claims a full share in the defeat of Germany for France. * August 30: Provisional Government of France is moved from Algiers to Paris. * August 31: Soviet Red Army liberates Bucharest. September * September 2: Future U.S. President and father of future U.S. President, Navt pilot George Herbert Walker Bush is shot down by anti-aircraft fire over Chichi Jimi in a Grumman TBF Avenger. His two subordinates Jack Delaney and Ted White do not survive. Was he too hasty in bailing out? Did he jump prematurely, pull his rip chord and smack his elite noggin on the horizontal stabilizer? * September 8: Red Army enters Sofia. * September 8: First of 1054 V-2 rocket attacks on the UK. The last will be on March 27, 1945. * September 9: Charles De Gaulle organizes a government of national unanimity including metropolitan French Resistance leaders, two of whom are Communists. * September 9: Hitler's democratic ally Finland and the Soviet Union sign peace agreement: 1940 borders reestablished, Finns expel German troops, ban fascist political parties, legalize Finnish Communist Party, restrict size of Finnish armed forces and to agree to hold war crimes trials. * September 22: Rep. John S. Tanner is born. October * October 11: Kolozsvar falls to the Soviet Red Army. * October 15: Hungarian dictator Miklos Horthy announces that Hungary is withdrawing from the war. Soviet Red Army troops already occupy the eastern part of the country. Hungarian collaborator Frenc Szalasi names Gen. Andras Zako as Chief of Hungarian military intelligence, with responsibility for organizing the Kopjas (pike-men), the intelligence and terror network left behind to harasss the occupying Soviet Red Army. * October 16: National Alliance fo Hungarian Workers (NAHW) convenes meeting in southern Transylvania town of Brasso. November * November 1: Jury in Cheyenne, Wyoming Federal court returns verdict of not guilty in the prosecution of journalist Jimmie Omura for conspiracy. * November 11: First free general election in liberated Hungary: : Political party and Seats in the Hungarian Parliament: :: Smallholders - 245 :: Communist Party - 70 :: Social Democrats - 69 :: National Peasants - 23 :: Bourgeois Democrats - 2 * November 21: Sen. Dick Durbin is born in East St. Louis, IL. December * December 11: Provisional Government headed by Gen. Bela Dalnoki Miklos takes power in Budapest. * December 12: Sir Phillip Mitchell appointed the first Governor of Britain's Kenya colony.